“Cold.”
“A bastard.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Nicholai asked, knowing that the answer would be “no,” and also knowing that Chen would appreciate a cigarette. He took a pack of Gauloises from his inside coat pocket and held it out to Chen. “Please.”
“Most kind.”
Chen took the proffered cigarette and then Nicholai leaned over the seat and offered one to the driver. He could see Chen’s annoyed look from the corner of his eye. Even in the “classless” society, there are classes, Nicholai thought.
The driver took the cigarette and, gloating, smiled at Chen in the rearview mirror, so Nicholai knew now that he was not terribly subordinate. A watcher to watch the watcher, he thought. He took out his French lighter, lit both men’s cigarettes, then his own. The car quickly filled with blue smoke.
“Good,” Chen said.
“Take the pack.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I have more.”
Chen took the pack.
Five minutes in the incorruptible People’s Republic, Nicholai thought, and the first bribe had been accepted.
Actually, Mao’s “Three Antis” Campaign to root out corruption among party officials was in full swing, and hundreds of bureaucrats had been summarily executed, shot in public displays, while thousands more had been shipped off to die slow deaths from exhaustion in work camps.
Nicholai noticed that Chen took four cigarettes from the pack and put them on the front seat for the driver. Prudent, he thought.
This was Nicholai’s first time in Beijing. He had been a boy in Shanghai, and that cosmopolitan city had seemed the world to him. The old imperial capital was so different, with its broad boulevards intended for military parades, its vast public spaces so open to the winds that it seemed almost meant as a warning of how quickly and completely things can change and how vulnerable one is to shifts in the wind.
Chen seemed a bit ahead of him. “You have never been to Beijing before?”
“No,” Nicholai said, peering out the window as the car pulled out onto Jianguomen Avenue. “And you, are you a native?”
“Oh, yes,” Chen said, as if surprised by the question. “I’m a Beijingren, born and bred. Outer City.”
In two blocks the street became Chang’an Avenue, the city’s main east-west arterial that flanked the southern edge of the Forbidden City, with its distinctive red walls. Nicholai could see the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao had stood a little over two years ago and declared the People’s Republic of China. He recalled from his briefing that Yuri Voroshenin was there with him that day.
Enormous plaques on either side of the gate read, respectively, “Long Live the People’s Republic of China!” and “Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World!”
“A small detour?” Chen asked.
“Please.”
Chen ordered the driver to take them around Tiananmen Square, which was a mess of construction work as it was being widened for even larger public demonstrations. Buildings were being torn down, the rubble removed or leveled.
“When it is done,” Chen said proudly, “it will hold over a million people.”
Many of whose homes had been torn down, Nicholai thought, to create space for them to publicly gather.
Beijing was an impressive, imposing city, created for the exercise of power. Nicholai preferred Shanghai, although he was sure it had changed as well. The China he had known was a motley of color and style – Shanghai was a center of high fashion – but the residents of Beijing in this time seemed almost cookie-cutter in their uniformity, most of them wearing the standard blue, green, or gray padded coats with baggy trousers and the same “Mao” caps.
Having negotiated Tiananmen, the driver turned north onto Wangfujing Street and pulled up in front of the Beijing Hotel, a turn-of-the-century European-style building, seven stories high, with three arched doorways and a colonnade on the top floor. The driver scurried out, retrieved Nicholai’s bag, and handed it to a hotel porter. The small middle-aged man struggled to heft the bag to the lobby, but spurned Nicholai’s proffered hand.
“He was the deputy mayor,” Chen grunted, ushering Nicholai past the porter. “Lucky to be alive.”
The lobby seemed a house of ghosts. Nicholai knew this had once been the European center of power in Beijing, where the Western barons of commerce lorded it over the Asians, and Chinese waiters scurried with trays of gin and tonics, whiskey and sodas as they endured the careless racism of the French, Germans, English, and Americans. It had been the same in Shanghai, but here – just a short walk from the Imperial Palace – it must have seemed even more insulting.
He was surprised that the Communists hadn’t simply demolished the building, leaving its painful associations in rubble, but he realized that the new regime needed a place to house its foreign guests. The lobby was clean but lifeless, scrubbed of any trace of decadence, devoid of the sense of luxury and privilege that it doubtless once possessed.
As life under capitalism was aggressively gauche, Nicholai thought, life under communism was deliberately drab.
The desk clerk, a young woman clad in the ubiquitous “Lenin suit” – a gray, double-breasted jacket with a sash belt – asked for his passport and was surprised when Nicholai produced it with a greeting in Chinese, “Have you eaten today?”
“I have, Comrade. And you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Room 502. The porter will-”
“I’ll take my own bag, thank you,” Nicholai said. He reached into his pocket for a yuan note to give the porter, but Chen stopped him.
“Tipping is not permitted in the People’s Republic,” Chen said.
“Of course not,” Nicholai said.
“Patronizing imperialist anachronism,” Chen added.
Quite a burden to carry, Nicholai thought, for a small gratuity.
The elevator ride was frightening, and Nicholai wondered when was the last time that the creaky lift had seen maintenance. But they made it to the fifth floor alive and Chen led him down the long hallway to his room.
The room was basic but clean. A bed, a wardrobe, two chairs, a side table with a radio, and a thermos of hot water for making tea. The attached bathroom had a toilet and a bathtub, but no shower. French doors in the main room opened onto a small balcony, and Nicholai stepped out and looked down on the front of the hotel and East Chang Street. To his right he could see Tiananmen Square.
“These rooms are reserved for very special guests,” Chen said when Nicholai stepped back inside.
I’ll bet they are, Nicholai thought. He would further bet that these rooms were also wired for sound to record every conversation of said special guests. He took off his coat, gestured for Chen to do the same, and hung both coats up in the wardrobe.
“May I offer you tea?” Nicholai asked.
“Very kind.”
Nicholai took two large pinches of green tea from a canister and put them into the pot. Then he poured the hot water in, waited for a few moments, and then poured the tea into two cups. Normally he would not have served tea made in the first steep, but he knew that fuel for heating water was at a premium and that waste would be considered offensive. He handed Chen the tea and both men sat down in the chairs.
After a sufficiently awkward silence, Chen said, “This is very good. Warming. Thank you.”
“I can hardly accept gratitude for your hospitality.”
Chen was disconcerted at the thought that the visitor might be under the misapprehension that the hotel stay was complimentary. He got right to it. “But you are paying for your room.”
“Still,” Nicholai said, remembering now how blunt the Chinese could be about business matters. So unlike the
